


these lofty thoughts are killing me

by anthrop



Series: Phic Phight 2020 [3]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Body Horror, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Gen, Trauma, as in a vegan who has communed with plants will suddenly find herself Struggling, post-Urban Jungle, that's what's happening here, unsure what you would call body horror but for plants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23644306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrop/pseuds/anthrop
Summary: Undergrowth Sam AU. Sam’s time as mother of Undergrowth’s garden left its scars—and scars can go deep. Sam’s always known she shared a close connection with plants, but now she hears them. She knows what they think and what they feel and can control them. On one hand it’s terrifying, but on the other….The ghosts should be a lot more terrified of her now.
Series: Phic Phight 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1686211
Comments: 12
Kudos: 110
Collections: Phic Phight!





	these lofty thoughts are killing me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ibelieveinahappilyeverafter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ibelieveinahappilyeverafter/gifts).



> Written for Phic Phight '20! ibelieveinahappilyeverafter's prompt is a topic I've played with in the past, but I definitely had a lot of new fun here. I kiiind of lost the plot a bit? Maybe not? I'll let you all make the final call, haha. This one kind of fought me for all that I enjoyed it, so it was written over the course of several days unlike the other fills I've done so far. Like the others, though, there's been virtually no editing done! So please forgive any weird typos or grammatical snafus; I'll more than likely sneak back here in a month or two to clean it up.
> 
> Title comes from Kim Tillman & Silent Films' ["Evelyn."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56DS2sqlFxU)

Sam tries not to think about then.

Maybe it's better to say she tries not to think about the gaping hole in her memory where _then_ ought to be.

She's hardly the only one in that particular boat. The whole of Amity Park suffers from a ghost-induced amnesia spanning over a week. It's all anyone talks about for ages; where they were when the plants attacked, where they were when they finally woke up again. Trying to make sense of senselessness. And even now, months after the fact, there are still traces of that city-wide attack not yet repaired. Cracked concrete, homes and business too ravaged to salvage, miles of withered vines with thorns like carving knives, enormous mummified plants with mammalian fangs in human mouths, swathes of green-limned ice that refuses to melt even now. 

(Every time one of the three of them finds another frozen chunk of Amity Park Danny moves ASAP to take care of it, since not even anything his parents have cooked up can do much damage to it. The guilt twisting Danny up is horrible to watch unfold across his weary face; made worse still because for all that he and Tucker insist otherwise, it really _was_ her fault.)

There's no hiding it: Amity Park was shaken to its _foundations_ by Undergrowth. Even more so, perhaps, than by Pariah Dark. The Ghost King had transported the _entire city_ directly into the Ghost Zone _and_ did his utmost to run it to ruin with his army of skeleton ghosts. It had been a terrifying and impossible experience, and everyone can agree they only got out of that one thanks to Phantom. But the thing is, everyone in Amity Park can _remember_ Pariah Dark's attack.

But Undergrowth? Flashes and flickers of almosts and maybes at _best_ for everyone involved, and that is somehow so much more terrifying. What did they do? What were they _made_ to do? How many missing and confirmed dead weren't taken by the towering ghost and all its myriad minions, but by one of _them?_ Are they _ever_ going to remember what happened? Is it better if they _don't?_

And on, and on, and Sam's right alongside everyone else except in every way she isn't. Yes, she doesn't remember anything. But she knows she's at fault, because Danny told her just so.

Not in so many words, of course. He's too good for that. Too good a person, too good a ghost, too good a hero. He would never lay the blame for anything terrible that happened at anyone's feet but his own. He wasn't good enough, strong enough, fast enough—and on, and on. Never mind that he went and scrounged up and _mastered_ an entirely new subset of powers just to counter Undergrowth—

_(and her)_

—and never mind the countless lives he did save. People were hurt, and worse, because _he_ thinks he wasn't the hero Amity Park thinks he is. That's just the way he _is._

Undergrowth was wrong. Sam knew that. She _knew_ that. He was too extreme, too insane, too insistent on terraforming the entire planet to suit his self-aggrandizing whim to consider the consequences for whatever else lives here. Not just self-centered jerks with their gas-guzzling cars and plastic, one time use lives. There are so _many_ people out there who understand what Sam's trying to do here in Amity, who do so much more to fight the ceaseless grinding up of Earth's finite resources than what one fourteen year old can do on her own. There are good people in the world fighting the evil and corrupt and greedy. There’s good in this world. You can't just—wipe the slate clean and start fresh.

You _can't._

* * *

Sam remembers—the first attack. 

Sam remembers—waking up after it was all over. 

She remembers feeling sick and sluggish. Boneless. Dizzy and swooping like she'd downed too much cold medicine. Limbs slow to react, her thoughts even slower. She remembers her surroundings like a badly dubbed old kung fu movie; everyone moving at exaggerated angles, their voices not matching their mouths. She remembers Danny blinking too quickly, like he was trying not to cry he was so glad to see she was okay.

She remembers thinking with a cold and sullen fury, _How dare he?_

_What the fuck?_ had followed right on the heels of that, thankfully, because she’d had no idea _why_ she'd ever in a million years be so angry with her best friend.

She remembers _—knowing_ time had passed. Too much time. A dangerous and scary amount of time. And she remembers looking around and seeing the city halfway destroyed. And she remembers—

—guilt.

Guilt that made no sense until Danny, hours and hours later, faltered through an obviously edited summary of the week Amity Park forgot. She and Tucker had both blinked at him, and at each other, horrified and dismayed to find that Danny had had to do so much all on his own, that they'd been so vulnerable, so _useless—_

—but there'd been no guilt in Tucker's expression. No sign of the guilt that tangled up her guts in a cat's cradle until she was certain she'd throw up—

—and then she _did_ have to throw up, staggering off to the bathroom in her basement, barely able to slam the door and fall to her knees before the toilet in time. She hates throwing up, hates the sweating and the shaking, hates the smell and the sound, hates how no matter what something always gets stuck in her nose. She'd screwed her face up tight so she didn't have to watch, rode out the worst of it, then sat there breathing wetly and hating life for a minute.

One of the boys had knocked gently on the bathroom door. "You okay?"

"Guh," she replied, throat hurting terribly at the effort. 

Sam remembers—opening her eyes, and the fear, and the confusion, and the certainty that she couldn't tell anyone, ever.

The toilet bowl had been full of flowers. 

* * *

That hasn't happened since, and—as far as she can tell—there haven't been any health issues that could have sprung up from having an indeterminate amount of flora taking root in her digestive system. 

She hasn't gone out much since then. School, patrol, the ghost attacks that invariably spring up outside of when she's penciled in time for a little extra chaos. She's made up excuses whenever Danny and Tucker invite her to hang out. She hasn't gone shopping or to a movie or any other perfectly normal after-school activity.

She's not hiding.

She's _not._

It's just... easier, to not be around people any more than the barest necessity. At least until she feels... settled again. Normal again. For her, and for whatever 'normal' is worth in a town regularly terrorized by bigger and toothier and crueler ghosts with every passing month. It's fine. Danny's got Tucker and Jazz for the attacks that she's slow to arrive for, and Danny is—

Danny can handle himself. He's strong. He's amazing. He took Undergrowth—

_(and her)_

—down all on his own, no power suit or ghostly backup needed. It's fine.

Her parents seem to have miraculously caught on for once that she really _does_ need some space; after the initial handsy-hugsy panicked relief the first couple days after Undergrowth, they gave her space (and anything else she asked for too, for that matter), only prodding her gently to come inside to eat now and then. Which she's grateful for, really, because she's pretty sure she wouldn't remember to eat at all without some prodding.

Something about eating rubs her wrong, now. The resistance of a carrot clenched between her teeth, the juicy flesh of an orange slice bursting under pressure, rice grains squirming like maggots on her tongue. She made a salad two days ago and couldn't stop thinking of the glamorized crime scenes from all those police procedural shows on TV; oversaturated, garish, someone's life torn open in a tasteless arrangement of stiff limbs. 

A cabbage is not a person. Cucumbers are not people. _Almonds are a good source of protein._

Damn it.

Most of the time she hides _—relaxes—_ in her greenhouse. Tucker had cracked a joke about that, though it had gone in one ear and out the other. Something something, bad taste. Blah blah, she's gone native. _Didn't I tell you plants are the enemy?_

Danny had laughed. Sam had to fight to keep her hands loose at her sides, to let it roll off like it didn't hurt while she tried to remind herself that it _shouldn't_ hurt. That had earned her another tally in the ‘needing time away from people’ column. Not like, total isolation. School. Patrol. Dinner with her parents and grandma. She still _does_ things with people. But every minute she's not in her greenhouse she feels this—this _hand_ around her heart. This tightness that squeezes just enough that she's never not aware of it, and it's become so, so much easier for her to startle, to flinch from loud noises, to find herself overstimulated by her friends laughing as she is people screaming in the wake of ghosts. The hand squeezes until she can hardly breathe, and she thinks of the flowers she'd thrown up and thinks of roots, and thorns, and the fragility of her lungs, and it gets so hard to _breathe—_

Nobody's caught her breaking down yet. She hopes she can keep it that way. She hopes she can get over this—this anxiety, or fear, or whatever this is. 

But for all that she spends so much time in her greenhouse, the only place she doesn't feel that hand around her heart, she can't really say she's all that relaxed there either.

* * *

Another day put between _then_ and now. Life around Amity Park is just about back to normal. If she's feeling generous with her definition of normal, anyway. She's made it through school without any issues and now she's free to hide _—relax!—_ for a few hours in her greenhouse before one of her parents will come tapping at the door.

"Hey guys," she says, lackluster.

The whole greenhouse _shivers_ at the sound of her voice.

Yep. That's totally normal. Nothing weird about that at all!

Ugh.

She goes through her after-school checklist by rote memory, biting her tongue to keep herself from the usual silly commentary she used to say along with it. She's learned better. Undergrowth did—something to her. Something she's lied through her teeth about to Danny and Tucker, assuring them that she's fine, she's normal, there aren't any lingering effects from—whatever it was. Is. She's different now. Not outwardly, not in any of the ways Danny risks being discovered as _inhuman_ every single day. She's not like Danny. She's still human.

She _is._

But she can still do inhuman things. Or—not do. Nothing as active as ghost rays or flight or anything _fun._ But she can—influence. She still has an inhuman _influence,_ and it's all she can do to keep her garden _still._

Even with her teeth clenched so tightly her jaw aches and a headache blooms—nngh—at her temples, the slightest graze of her fingers across a leaf makes whatever plant she's touched quivering. When she picks up her pruning shears to clean up the tomato plants she can _see_ them flush bigger and brighter before her very eyes. There's the tiniest, softest—niggling in the back of her mind, an itch on her teeth and goosebumps down her skin.

_(mother)_

She drops the shears. Before she can move to grab them a tendril of healthy green leaves curls off of the trellis to pluck them up out of the dirt and deposit them neatly in her numb hands again.

"...Thanks," she grits out.

All of the tomatoes swell to the size of tennis balls, their leaves straining to catch up. Two of the nearest ones split their blood red skins open to beam beatifically at her. There are teeth in their dripping grins, or something shaped enough like teeth to curdle her stomach.

_"Stop."_

The grins shrink, though the seams remain. She resolves to never eat those two. The thought of throwing them out however, is almost as revolting. She leaves without finishing the after-school checklist, opting to hide in the basement bowling alley with her grandma until dinner. It's not half as relaxing as it used to be.

* * *

She can't avoid her greenhouse. Not even for a day. Her garden needs daily attention. It needed it—before. 

It _did._

Now the thought of ignoring it, even for an afternoon, makes her physically ill. So she doesn't know if it's guilt for not finishing her after-school checklist earlier or something—else, something left in her from then—

—she tries, she tries, she _tries_ to remember anything from _then,_ but there's only—

—hunger, and anger, and pride for her—

—her—

—her _children._

Nothing concrete. Nothing real. Nothing she can make use of. All she knows is that she's different, and it's most obvious here in her chil—

—garden. Her _garden._

They won't hurt her. No matter what she says or does, this she knows for certain. Her garden will never hurt her.

Somehow, that isn't as comforting as it should be. All she can think of are teeth sinking into meat, and the sound of a scream, and _splattering—_

And she has no idea if Undergrowth made her order the—the—the _children_ to kill someone, or if he goaded her into doing it personally. And she doesn't know which is worse. 

It's night now. Late. After patrol. Her cell phone is an intrusive blue glow in her greenhouse, the only light she dare use in case one of her parents is still awake. For all that they've been weirdly accommodating since then, she doesn't want to push her luck. It's a school night, after all. It's hardly any light at all to go by, really. She's tempted to pull up the flashlight app at least, but—

_(hello hello)_

_(mother's back)_

_(we missed you mother)_

—it's maybe safer to do this in the dark. For all that her throat closes up when she hears a loud _rustling_ sweep through her greenhouse. For all that her feet feel like dead weights as she drags them across the dirt floor until she's stood in the center. In the heart of her domain.

She breathes. 

"I hear you," she whispers.

The rustling grows louder, and louder still. Tables creak under growing and shifting weights. Shadows move closer into the faint light of her cell phone. A hundred or more whispers settle in some weird space between her sinus cavity and her brain, heard like something from the cusp of a dream. _Mother,_ they all say. _We love you, we love you, we're here for you._

Her legs give out, but something cool and dry catches her before she can fall. She clings to it, swallowing a shriek. They won't hurt her.

They _won't._

Now she just has to make sure they won't hurt anyone else either.

"That's right. I'm your—ha." She buries her face in her hands, feeling somewhere between playing pretend and outright deranged. _"Ha ha!_ Can—this is—can you call me something else? Please? I'm _way_ too young to be anybody's mom, let alone my own personal—shit, I dunno. All of you. Just—call me Sam."

That earns her a whole bass-boosted chorus of _Sam! Sam! Sam!_ until she lets go of the vine-branch-thing to clap her hands over her ears. "Easy! Jeez! Take it down a notch, okay? I really can't—do this—with all of you shouting at me."

_Sam! Sam! Sam!_ gets a lot quieter. Not manageable, not really, since a bunch of plants are chanting her name like she's a rock star, but at least it feels less like she's laid out in a dentist's chair getting worked on without local anesthetic. 

"Okay. Okay. I—" she giggles. This is so stupid. This is so dangerous. "Are you—Undergrowth?"

Shadows chirp _no, no, no_ at her like hulking baby birds. 

"Are you still his, though? If he came back, would you listen to him instead of me?"

_No, no, no,_ they chirp. Something coils up one of her legs, catching on her bootlaces and tickling the back of her knee. 

"No, you're not his?"

_Not his,_ something whispers _right_ in her fucking _ear._ She recoils, trips over whatever's feeling up her thigh, and gets caught again by the vine-branch-thing. She's pretty sure it's a branch of her orange tree. It smells citrus-y, at least. Splayed ungainly, she tries to get her heart under control. She feels like she's in the middle of a horror movie. It's way too easy to imagine some know-it-all dipshit yelling at her through a mouthful of popcorn. _Get out, you dumb bitch!_

Yeah, yeah. She knows. She knows. Messing around with things she doesn't understand is what got Danny zapped in the first place. It's a long chain of events between the accident and tonight, but every step of it's her fault.

"Okay," she says shakily. "Okay. And if he came back...?"

_We're yours,_ her garden croons, humming all at once and all through her in a way that makes it feel like her muscles are coming loose from her bones. _We belong to you, our Sam._

She shivers. "L-lucky me."

* * *

So this is a thing she's got going on now, apparently, and no obvious way to make it stop. At least, not any way that wouldn't require her to tear her greenhouse apart down to the last garlic bulb, which would be extraordinarily expensive, extraordinarily alarming to anyone who knows her, and extraordinarily too much like a whole lot of murder. Plants aren't people, but _these_ plants sure do like to tell her how much they love her.

So. It's a thing. Talking to plants. Plants that are definitely souped up on whatever ambient juice is leftover from Undergrowth terraforming the whole city. Plants that keep growing mouths full of fangs and strangling vines with thorns longer than her thumb despite her practically begging them to _just_ be carrots, please. It's feeling a little too Little Shop of Horrors for comfort. She keeps emphasizing the strict no meat diet she's got them on, glad that her family's never had any interest in coming in here. You know. Just in case. Thing is though, her concern—so far, anyway—seems pretty unwarranted. Her garden seems happy enough on the perfectly healthy diet of perfectly normal plants. Sunshine, air, water, a good layer of compost. 

They just keep thanking her so feverishly for so little. It's—unsettling. A little bit awful. Maybe more than a little bit. Maybe this psychic connection thing goes two ways, and her garden is influencing her into—what? Feeling guilty? For what? They all seem so happy for the slightest bit of her attention. It doesn't seem like it'll occur to them all that they could ever ask her for more.

Maybe it's not healthy that she's thinking of her plants as thinking creatures instead of some kind of echo chamber for whatever Undergrowth did to her. The longer she lets this go on, the more the voices of her garden feel-sound like her own thoughts. And it's been going on for a while. Long enough that Danny and Tucker have noticed the uptick in her behavior, both commenting in their own ways that they're happy she's acting more like her old self again.

Yeah. Right. Nothing supernaturally weird going on with her at all, no sir-ee!

Still, for all that she can't stop her garden from going the _plantae_ equivalent of full werewolf, she has managed to keep them organized. Well. Bit of seesaw on that. The overcrowding got sorted out by some aggressive behavior. Some _very_ aggressive behavior. She's definitely had one nightmare already, reliving the gruesomely _wet_ memory of having to bodily haul the thing that used to be her prized Venus flytrap off of the thing that used to be her kiwi vine. 

Point is, she has half the number of plants in her garden than she did two weeks ago, which—fine. It's not like she was planning on eating any of them anymore. She's not really—eating much, lately. She's been able to pass it off as no big deal around Danny and Tucker (never in a million years did she ever think she'd be grateful for the Box Ghost interrupting lunch so often, but here she is!), and she keeps reassuring her family that she's gotten into the habit of taking more of her meals in her greenhouse. The truth is she's been eating a _lot_ of cereal and tripling her vitamin intake. Cereal hasn't betrayed her yet, but in a town like Amity Park that's no guarantee.

She knows it's a stopgap measure. Someone's going to find her out, or her garden's going to get ghostly enough for Danny to sense it, or someone will be stupid enough to walk in here and she might actually end up with some real life Audrey II bullshit.

"If any of you start singing, I won't be held accountable for my actions," she threatens one evening, brandishing a trowel. The garden makes a bunch of querying noises at her, tangling around her ankles like an alien's limited grasp of the concept of a pet cat. She's given up wearing leggings entirely, having thrown the last ruined pair away after her parents had gone to bed. She'd bought three pairs of jeans—black, of course—last Saturday when she braved the mall with Danny and Tucker. At least artfully torn jeans are fashionable enough that nobody but her mom is going to think anything odd about it.

"Never mind," she sighs, and gives in to the urge to scratch one of her plants along its spiny sepals. It purrs happily, and soon a whole group of waist-high plants that look like something right out of Poison Ivy's own evil lair are crooning at her for scritches. 

* * *

She ends up sneaking off on her own to PetSmart an hour before it closes, bailing on patrol for the sixth time since Undergrowth. There's definitely some line between crazy plant lady and weird dog mom she's pole vaulting over, but—whatever.

She buys a _lot_ of dog toys. Her garden especially loves the tug-of-war ropes, but the bright green squeaky bone turned out to be an A+ impulse buy too.

* * *

It takes a while, and a _lot_ of adjusting, and she still hasn't figured out an alternative long-term diet, but overall things settle. She finds a new balance. She basically sleeps well enough, and her grades are fine, and the ghost attacks don't get _too_ left-field. Danny shoulders most of that anyway these days, more comfortable with his powers and the popularity boost saving the city gave Phantom with everybody. Used to be her and Tucker put in the same hours and effort as Danny—if you don't count the superpowers—but lately? They're better for cover stories and clean-up, which is fine with Sam while she sorts all this post-Undergrowth ghost-plant stuff out. Tucker's just happy he finishes out the semester with the same PDA he started it with.

Of course, all good things are temporary. She really ought to have this figured out by now.

It's a ghost attack that unravels it all, naturally. This one's a new face; some kind of unsettling, skitter-y combination hydra-centipede about the length of a limousine. Its six necks accordion though, _and_ it spits acid. Both are nasty surprises Danny wasn't expecting, and he ends up getting tossed through the front pane of a mom-and-pop hardware store. He'll be fine, though she and Tucker both have to tamp down on their standard panicked 'oh shit our best friend would have _absolutely_ just died if he were normal' reaction to go distract the ghost from going after a minivan. 

They circle around it, shouting nonsensical insults that it probably doesn't understand to get its attention, helped by a few firm blasts of some small ecto-guns they'd pilfered a while back. Only one shot actually gets a hit on something that isn't its purple exoskeleton; Tucker whoops loudly when it screeches in pain. Sam uses the precious seconds to circle around to the other side of the minivan to yank open the sliding door and start manhandling a group of elementary-aged kids in blue soccer uniforms out and into whatever shop is closest. The mom squawks affront until Sam hisses at her to hurry her ass up if she doesn't want to go the same way as the hatchback—thankfully empty—that had ended up wrapped around a telephone pole. That gets soccer mom moving, and they're both just clear of the van before she hears Tucker _scream_ her name. 

She moves on an instinct honed by two years of fighting for her life; she shoves soccer mom _hard_ and whirls around in time to see the _roof_ of the minivan as it comes flipping right at her. _"No—!"_ is all she has time for, throwing up her hands as bolts of neon green strike _up_ in her periphery. The minivan crumples with a horrible shriek of metal and hangs, creakingly, not a foot above her head. She blinks in the sudden shadow, heart hammering in her throat. She expects to hear Danny's voice, either a dry quip or an earnest rush of concern, depending on how hard the hydrapede rattled him.

A nonplussed, "What the _fuck,"_ from Tucker is what she gets instead. 

She looks around. There's the familiar ghost-green glow, but it's not Danny's burning hands or headlight-bright eyes. Two thorny vines, thick as tree trunks, have punched through the concrete to catch the minivan before it could crush her.

_(mother)_ she hears them yap at her happily.

Well, shit.

* * *

The fight wraps up without any other cars or business fronts getting destroyed. Danny makes good use of those ice powers, and in a matter of minutes Tucker's got the thing slurped up in one of the three Thermoses they've gotten in the habit of having on hand, just in case.

Then Danny and Tucker make matched crazy eyes at her and the modern art she accidentally made out of soccer mom's claim to fame.

"Not here," she tells them firmly. If soccer mom figures out there's a chance she could pin her totaled minivan on her—and her incredibly wealthy parents—they'll get stuck here all day. Tucker gets it before Danny does and makes a show of shoulder-checking him pointedly as he jogs off. Danny shuts his mouth and winks out of sight, leaving Sam to jog after Tucker. Which she will, just after she tries something first.

She glares at the two vines—standard curb weeds once upon ten minutes, more than likely—and thinks at them very hard. Thank you, much appreciated, _stop_ calling me mother, _go away._

She gets some kind of bizarre-o feedback that feels like chewing on gum with the wrapper still on, and also like skinned knees, but in her brain? Ugh. With a reluctance that shouldn't be so obvious from a couple of plants, the two vines sort of... shrink? Melt? Reverse-grow back into two perfectly normal bits of scruffy green in a totally wrecked stretch of sidewalk.

Good enough! Better than she expected, really! 

Soccer mom starts babbling something very loud about her car, which is Sam's cue to run for the hills. She does so, dreading the conversation she's about to have with her best friends, but also... kind of excited for the next ghost attack?

If she has to deal with having creepy psychic monster plant-making powers, she may as well get some mileage out of them. Right?


End file.
